by Gavin Lyall
Most of the rest of the markings I guessed were small-plane strips on the big plantations. Not long enough for regular military use, but nice to know about in case you wanted to crash-land.
Ned came in wrapped in a crisp white towelling bath-robe that seemed oddly fancy with his great hairy hands and feet sticking out of it. He gave me a sharp look, but didn’t tell me to get away from the map. I got away anyhow, sat down at the card table, and began a count-down on my pipe.
‘This is one of the best ops rooms I’ve ever seen,’ I remarked.
‘Just a weekend joint.’ He nodded at the ceiling. ‘The General’s got the pent-house.’
That was logical, too, when you thought about it. It’s easier to seal off the top of a big hotel against assassins than it would be a house. And it solves all the servant problems for you, too.
‘What about General Castillo?’
He chuckled. ‘He lives in a tent, poor bug-bitten bastard. Leading the noble army in the field.’
‘And why isn’t the noble Air Force in tents, too? Your forward base not secure enough? Or are you having supply problems?’
He smiled, but with his mouth firmly shut. He might be ready to talk about the Army; he wasn’t going to spill any of the Air Force’s secrets.
I took my pipe for a short walk to get it a bit of air it hadn’t breathed three times already. At the end of it, I found myself by the refrigerator, so I filled up my glass again. Ned shook his head at a second beer. I walked back to the table and struck the third match.
‘Feel like any food?’ Ned asked.
‘No, thanks.’
‘I could get up some sandwiches.’
‘If you want to eat them yourself.’
After a moment he asked: ‘Like to suck a piece of ice?’
‘No.’
‘You’re going to get loaded fast.’
‘That’s right. I got grounded today – remember?’
He nodded slowly. The red telephone buzzed.
He was there in a couple of strides. He listened for a while, then said: ‘Scramble the forward section. Tell ‘em not to go above ten and tell the army to put down smokewhen they see the planes -not before.’ He put down the phone. ‘Damn army’s always putting down smoke markers the moment they run into anything. Rebels know what it means by now, so they scarper before we can get there.’
‘How frightfully unsporting of them.’
He didn’t answer. My crack just hung there with the pipe smoke and turned sour and dwindled and died. The room had gone very quiet. Only the radio breathed softly to itself.
After a time I got up to pour myself another drink, and found I was moving on tiptoe, shutting the refrigerator door as gently as I could. I opened my mouth to say something, then didn’t. I just listened.
You don’t have to like the man in the other cockpit. You canwant to kill him – not angrily, but coldly and carefully enough to have trained yourself to wait until you’re close enough to shoot at the cockpit, not just the plane. But you understand him; you can’t help understanding him. Because the instruments he watches, the controls he handles, are the same as in your own cockpit. Because his problems of speed and height, range and fuel, sun and cloud, are your problems. You know him far better than you know a ground soldier on your own side, fighting for your own cause.
So you don’t have to like him, or his cause either. But you do have to sit still and breathe quietly and listen when a man you know is going into action.
It took a long time. The air-conditioning built up a chill that made me shiver. Ned hunched on the far side of the table, just watching the radio.
Then suddenly it crackled fast Spanish. Ned grabbed the phone and yelled: ‘Tell the stupid cows to speak English! Jiminez could be monitoring this channel! ‘
He slammed the phone down. ‘Christ – nobody thinks a man who’ll buy three-inch mortars might have the sense to buy a normal shortwave receiver as well.’
‘And learn to speak English too, maybe.’
He shrugged. ‘I’m trying to get ‘em used to code, too. It takes time.’
The radio crackled faintly, but we weren’t picking up the transmissions from the base: close as it was, there must have been a hill between it and the Americana.
Then, slowly and carefully, like a reciting schoolboy: ‘Green leader calls “Goalpost”. I have seen the smoke. It is a roadblock. With muchrebeldes.I am going to shoot it.’ Pause. ‘Green two -1 break left, break left,now! ‘
‘Code,’ I said softly. ‘What does he say when he speaks in clear – tell you about his birthmarks?’
‘He said “Goalpost”, didn’t he?’
‘If you call that code for home base…’ Neither of us were really listening – even to ourselves. We were both living the rolling turn, the long wriggling dive as you bring your guns to bear, and the last dangerous seconds as the ground rushescloseand you’re forcing the nosedown because the range is shortening.
‘Target hypnotism,’ they call it – and, a couple of days later, a ‘fighter pilot funeral’ when they bury a box of sand with a few grain-sized pieces of you mixed in.
The radio gave a few distant crackles; now they were too low to reach over this range.
‘They make two passes?’ I asked.
‘On a target like this, yeh.’
‘Every man a hero.’ The second pass is the worst. If there’s anybody left alive on the ground (and if there isn’t, why are you attacking again?) you’ve given him a dress rehearsal: he’s got his eye in to your speed and angle.
But why should I care? If Jiminez’ boys managed to knock down a Vampire – and damn little chance they stood with rifles, even light machine-guns, against a Vamp’s four twenty-millimetre cannon – that suited me fine.
I still understood the man in the cockpit far better than the poor bastard with a rifle down at the roadblock.
Then, distant but getting louder quickly: ‘… have shoot ourmunitio. Roadblock is destroyed. Manyrebeldesare dead-‘
Ned growled: ‘That means two men and a dog.’
‘… Army advancing. I request instructions. Over.’
Ned looked at his watch and picked up the phone. ‘Tell ‘em to return Goalpost. And tell the army we’re through for the day.’
He snapped off the radio. The room suddenly seemed much too cold, the whisky bitter on my tongue. Well, maybe the next one would taste better. I filled my glass, then opened a window to let in a little heat and the friendly, distant hum of traffic on the Avenida Independencia. I leant against the sill and sipped.
After a time, I said: ‘And that concludes our Saturday afternoon programme of sport from the Free Republic.’
Ned looked at me, then shrugged and went to get himself another beer. ‘You can’t have all your battles big ones, Keith -not if you’re a pro. It’s the amateurs who feel brave just because it’s D-Day; you know that.’
‘I know pros aren’t the answer in this place, either, Ned.’
‘Yeh? You think Jiminez’d sell off the Vamps if he got in?’
‘I’ll tell you one thing he’d sell off: you – in small pieces.’
He stared at me, then nodded slowly. Nobody builds up hate so much as a ground-attack pilot; a strafing fighter is partly a terror weapon, swooping omnipotent out of the sky, soaring away back. If you get hit by ground fire, you do your damndest to land well away from the people you’ve been shooting up. Rules of war don’t apply to a god who’s fallen off his pedestal.
‘Yeh, could happen,’ he said finally. ‘But – I wonder who’d get my job then. You? That what you pushing for?’
‘I’m not pushing, Ned. I’m not a professional any more.’
He stared at me. Then he nodded and said slowly and perplexedly: ‘Yeh, that’s right, isn’t it? If you were a pro, you’d have joined the firm when I offered the job. You worry me, Keith. I don’t know if you’re working for Jiminez or not -maybe not. But either way, the General made a mistake with you. You should’ve been in ja
il. Then we’d’ve known where you were and you’d have got your plane back at the end. Now – you’re loose but you don’t have a plane to fly. And that worries me. Because you’re still a killer.’
The word had no sting; it was just a statement – a definition of a trade.
He ended up in front of me, stabbing a thick finger at my chest. ‘I’ll do what I can for you. Try to get your Dove back. I don’t think I can do it, but I’ll try. You need any money?’
‘That could have been more tactfully put, Ned.’
He shook his head impatiently. ‘You know I’m loaded right now – so d’you want any of it? Just to take yourself a quiet holiday somewhere for a couple of months?’
‘What’s all this to you, Ned?’
‘If I can’t have you in jail, maybe Miami Beach’ll do. Just keeping out of the way. Otherwise’ – he shrugged – ‘I could end up having to kill you.’
‘You could end up trying,’ I snapped. ‘And I mean end up.’
He grinned crookedly. ‘You see?’
After a while I grinned back. ‘This town ain’t big enough for both of us – is that it?’
‘It’s a small town, all right – the whole damn Caribbean. Okay’ – he rubbed the back of his neck thoughtfully – ‘we just have to wait and see. You want to go on talking politics, or just drink?’
I emptied my glass and handed it over. ‘Let’s just drink.’
Things got a little fuzzy after that. But somebody got me into a taxi around ten o’clock, and I came slightly awake at half-past eleven and found myself aviating towards San Juan aboard the World’s Most Experienced Airline, eating a piece of the World’s Most Experienced chicken and with a glass of beer in my other hand.
Luiz was sitting alongside me; J.B. and Whitmore just across the aisle, the two directors somewhere behind.
Luiz leant and dropped a pair of dice on my tray. ‘A small souvenir of General Bosco.’
I blinked blearily at them, and the dots blinked blearily back. ‘So?’
‘My friend, they are loaded.’
I picked them up, dropped them into my glass of beer – the old test for loaded dice. They tumbled slowly and showed a 6 and a 2. I drank them out, dropped them in again. I got a 4 and a 1.
‘They don’t seem to be winning anything for me. The General ought to fire his dice loaders.’
‘My friend – do you think these belonged to the General?’
‘You mean the Americana was giving him loaded dice?’
He smiled sunnily. ‘So what could they lose? – he does not play against the house, only among his good friends. So the house get his custom, they help him win a little, and his beautiful smile brightens their dark, drab lives. The stick-man was highly annoyed when I first grabbed them before they could be changed and then walked off with them.’
I remembered that fuss with the croupier. ‘But I still don’t see which sides are weighted.’
He winced. ‘My friend, one does not load theside of a dicethese days – it is much too blatant. One loads acorner. Then, if all goes well, that corner must be on the table and one of only three faces will be at the top. I will show you.’ He stretched his hand; I fished the dice out of my drink and passed them over. He turned them in his long brown fingers.
‘Now these, although they are rather heavily loaded, so they almost always turn up “loaded” faces, are also rather subtle. Each is loaded at a different corner. One can show only a 1, 2, or 4; the other a 2, 4, or 6. Nice harmless numbers – but you can work out for yourself what they mean.’
The hell I could – in my state. I stared Wearily. He sighed and explained: ‘Two normal dice can throw thirty-six combinations: One 2, two 3s – and so on up to six 7s, then down again to one 12. But these can throw only nine combinations, including only one 7, one 3 – but two 6s and two 8s. And no 2 or 11 or 12 and some others.
‘So: in nine first throws the General will win once with a 7, lose once with a 3 – enough to allay suspicion. But mostly he will throw something else and have to throw it again. Then he has a fifty-fifty chance, and if it is a 6 or an 8, he has a two-to-one chance. Overall it means…’ he scribbled a quick formula on his menu card, ‘it means he will win thirty-one times out of fifty-four. Say a three-to-two advantage. Enough – but only enough that people will say the General is lucky. And it does a dictator no harm to be known as lucky.’
He handed the dice back. I turned them in my hand, looking for signs of the loading. A great hope; in my current condition I couldn’t have seen signs of an elephant loaded into a telephone-box.
‘How did you come to spot this?’
‘I played with them on the table – and found I threw only those numbers. And also -1 was born in this part of the world. One comes to expect dictators to play with loaded dice.’
‘I know just what you mean.’
THIRTEEN
We flew back to Kingston by a direct British West Indies flight the next afternoon. J.B. had rung ahead and there were a couple of film cars waiting at the airport to carry them back over to Ochoríos. I dropped off at the Myrtle Bank hotel.
Whitmore lifted a big hand and said: ‘Don’t fret too hard, fella. You’re still on the payroll. We’ll call you.’
J.B. dug in her fat briefcase and came up with a wad of dollars. ‘I make it we owe you for a three-hour ride. Two hundred and forty-four dollars, eighty cents – right?’
I shrugged.
Whitmore said: ‘Call it $250. It ain’t much of a bonus for knocking down a jet, but I don’t know how we’d explain that in the budget.’ He smiled. Joke.
I smiled back and said ‘Thanks’ and they drove away, leaving me standing on the hotel drive with my handful of money and the doorman looking at it curiously. After a while I walked through to the bar.
The next day I went through the proper motions without getting any further than I’d expected, which was exactly nowhere. The insurance company shook its head and regretted that confiscation wasn’t covered. After them I tried various Jamaican authorities and the British High Commission to see if I could get a bit of diplomatic pressure on my side. Jamaican authority just didn’t want to know; the Repúblicawas some unknown quantity out of sight over the horizon… They were quite ready to believe they confiscated aeroplanes there; hell, they already believed they ate babies and danced naked in the streets at high noon there. So what could you do about it? It was another suburb.
The High Commission sympathised and said it would ask the Commonwealth Relations Office in London to ask the Foreign Office to ask the consul in Santo Bartolomeo… I clicked the loaded dice in my pocket and went away to ring Diego Ingles and tell him the flying lessons were off, indefinitely. I couldn’t find him. I was back in the Myrtle Bank by five.
Tuesday was more of the same, only I was running short of people to complain to. So I tried the Flying Club, which sometimes chartered out small planes, to ask if they needed a pilot. But it was their slack season, too. I still couldn’t reach Diego. I thought about the crop-spray boys – but that was a big decision, even if they really wanted me. A different type of flying, a different life. I decided to wait until I was off Whitmore’s payroll. That day I was in the bar soon after four.
About an hour later the barman handed me the phone; it was J.B. ‘The Boss Man wants to buy you a beer. Get yourself a taxi on over; we’ll pay it. Okay?’
I thought of reminding her I had a jeep, then decided that if there was any serious drinking coining up, I didn’t wantthat with me. ‘All right – where to?’
‘You know a house called Oranariz? He’s rented it.’
I said I knew it and would be there in a couple of hours.
Jamaican taxis aren’t surprised at the idea of a sixty-mile trip, so the doorman found one for me pretty easily. We went over the short, steep way, up into the hills to Castleton, down again to Port Maria, and then along the north coast road.
Oranariz – which means ‘golden nose’ in Jamaican Spanish – is one of a collect
ion of pricey modern houses around Oracabessa (golden mouth) near the Boscobel airstrip. They’re mostly called Ora-something or just Golden Head, Goldeneye and so on. This one belonged to a writer who was rich enough to afford to live in London and rent off his Jamaican house most of the year. Visiting film stars often took it.
The house itself wasn’t all that much – nothing like the ‘Big Houses’ the Victorian planters built in the hills so that they could take long walks without breathing the open air along with the workers – but what there was of it was good. A long, low bungalow built around three sides of a four-car courtyard, with a fashionable wood-tiled roof, windows with elegant white hurricane shutters, a wide marble-tiled patio around the outside walls. The big point was that it was private: it had itsown walled-in three acres of jungle facing over a small cove and beach that couldn’t be reached except from above – or by boat.
The road gate was open and J.B. met usin the courtyard, wearing a cool tube dress of white lace and carrying the usual wad of dollars. She paid off the driver and led the way through the house on to the patio facing the sea.
The first thing that hit me was a refrigerator of my own height, connected by a wire through an open window. On either side of it Whitmore and Luiz were stretched out in aluminium lounging chairs. The third person present was young Diego Ingles.
I was still wondering how he’d got into the charmed circle when Whitmore called: ‘Hi, fella. Beer or whisky?’
‘Beer, please.’
Luiz stretched an arm and yanked open the refrigerator door, Whitmoie stuck in a hand and pulled out a bottle of Red Stripe, Luiz swung the door shut. It was a smooth piece of teamwork that didn’t shift either of them an inch in their chairs.